THE ART OF PAUL REED: Color, Creativity, Curiosity

David Gariff

Color thinks for itself, independently of the objects that it clothes. — Charles Baudelaire

Paul Reed1 at the age of ninety-one continues to make art in the basement studio of his

Arlington, Virginia home. The studio opens up to the light and colors of the landscape behind

his house, a gentle descending slope through trees to a small tributary of the Potomac River.

Reed spends as much time outdoors as weather permits. His most recent , washes and

drizzles of paint stained on unstretched, raw muslin, illuminate the rooms of his house. Attached

to his windows, they create a vision of modernist stained glass that serves to unify and blur

distinctions between interior and exterior, light and color, art and nature. As if in homage to

Matisse and Rothko, light and color enliven this domestic space and present a personal

microcosm of the defining nature of Paul Reed’s artistic world. There is no more revealing

setting to illustrate the goals and ideas that have motivated Reed’s lifelong devotion to the art of

and his endless exploration of the many and varied properties of color. This in no way

diminishes Reed’s accomplishments in sculpture, photography, , graphic design, and

computer-generated imagery—all of which are part of a continuity of thought and an endless

curiosity about art.

Paul Reed’s journey is a long one. A native of Washington, D.C. he is best known as one

1 For the Paul Allen Reed papers, 1952‐2008, see the Smithsonian , http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/collection/reedpaul.htm. For an oral history interview with Paul Allen Reed, 1994 April 29, see http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/oralhistory/reed94.htm

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of the original artists of the .2 As with many artists, Reed’s career is

characterized by many twists and turns along the way. After briefly attending college at San

Diego State College (1936) and the Corcoran School of Art (1937), Reed found his way to New

York City and employment as a magazine illustrator and graphic designer (1942-50). Reed’s

time in New York during the 1940s coincided with the emergence of .

The achievements of New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz

Kline, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still made a lasting impression on him.

Reed returned to Washington in 1950 to open his own free-lance graphic design firm.

His long-standing friendship with the painter Gene Davis3 (1920-1985), who Reed had known

since junior high school, continued and the two men were frequent visitors to the National

Gallery of Art and ,4 as well as to a host of smaller private galleries then

thriving in the area. Speaking about , Reed states:

My chief stimulation in art at that time came from Gene Davis. We talked, exchanged books, saw each other often. He is an intelligent man and his ideas were always interesting; possibly of more meaning to me than his work was at the time.5

Another formative influence on Reed was the local artist, curator, and teacher Jacob

2 For a history of the Washington Color School, see C. Humblet, The New American Abstraction 1950‐1970, 3 vols., Milan, Skira, 2007, volume 2 contains the chapter on Paul Reed. See also K. Wilkin, Color as Field: American Painting, 1950‐1975, New York, American Federation of Arts, 2007.

3 See Jacquelyn D. Serwer, et al., Gene Davis, a Memorial Exhibition, Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, 1987.

4 These two Washington museums also influenced concerning color. The Chester Dale Collection of Impressionist and Post‐Impressionist paintings had recently gone on view at the National Gallery. The Phillips Collection was created, in part, around the formal element of color with works by important modernists including Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Milton Avery, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Arthur Dove. See E.A. Carmean, Jr., Morris Louis: Major Themes and Variations, Washington, D.C., , 1976, 3. See also Kimberly A. Jones and Maygene Daniels, The Chester Dale Collection, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2009.

5 G. Nordland, The Washington Color Painters, Washington, D.C., Washington Gallery of , 1965, 42.

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Kainen (1909-2001). Kainen was an important conduit of information about abstract

painting and the New York School for all young Washington artists at the time.6

In 1952, Reed turned his attention to painting. The influence of the American Abstract

Expressionists shapes this early work. These small-scale experiments in oil, watercolor, enamel,

and gouache on paper or masonite, Alpha (1952) and Platform I (1956) for example, are fluid

and loosely painted in keeping with the spontaneity and vigor of the New York School. Platform

I also explores the tension between a painterly field and a geometric form descending from the

top edge of the frame, similar to the “push and pull” of tensions in paintings by Hans Hofmann

and Robert Motherwell. This dialogue between color and structure, active and static elements,

would become an important part of Reed’s vocabulary in later works.

Also of importance for Reed at this time were the “Flag” and “Target” series by Jasper

Johns that had recently burst on the art scene. The “Flag” paintings appeared to Reed as a daring

venture with their edge-to-edge treatment of an iconic image, encaustic surfaces, and color

alterations.

With the availability of commercially produced acrylic paints, both magna (an acrylic

resin paint) and water-based acrylics in the1950s, Reed began to explore the properties and

working methods of staining or soaking colors into unprimed, cotton duck canvas. Here he built

upon techniques already pioneered by Morris Louis7 (1912-1962), and Kenneth Noland8 (1924-

6 For an online transcript of an oral history interview with Jacob Kainen, 1982 August 10 – September 22, see The Smithsonian Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/oralhistory/kainen82.htm

7 See John Elderfield, Morris Louis, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1986.

8 See Karen Wilkin, , New York, Rizzoli, 1990 and Diane Waldman, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1977. The term “Washington Color School” can be misleading. Reed, for example, never knew Morris Louis personally. Louis died on September 7, 1962 at the age of forty‐nine at his home in Washington, D.C. 3

2010) in Washington who, in turn, had witnessed the stained paintings of Helen Frankenthaler9 in New York in 1953. The seminal Frankenthaler picture in this evolution was Mountains and

Sea, 1952 (on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington).10 By 1959, Reed was

engaged in the staining process, allowing water-based acrylics to bleed and fuse into the surface

of the canvas and respond to gravity to create floating, luminous, and optical fields of color.

The center of the canvas is of particular importance in Reed’s first stained series,

“Mandala.” (Mandala is the Sanskrit word for “circle.”) In works like #27 (1962) and 12C

(1963) the circular designs of color appear to radiate outward from a central core. Centrality is

reinforced by the square format of the supports (3’ x 3’ and 2’ x 2’ respectively). A feeling of expansiveness and luminosity characterizes these paintings as seemingly disembodied colors appear to shift and pulsate. One thinks of Kenneth Noland’s “Target” series, but in Reed’s

“Mandala” paintings, it is as much about outward movement as inner focus. In both series, color interactions are at the heart of the effects, and lessons learned from important color theorists

Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981) underpin the works.11

It was clear to many in the art world that something important was emerging from the painters in Washington, D.C. Much of the activity centered on the Washington Gallery of

Modern Art (WGMA) near Dupont Circle, one of the first galleries devoted to

9 See Julia Brown, After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956‐1959, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1998.

10 For a discussion of the impact of Mountains and Sea on both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, see , “Louis and Noland,” Art International, IV, 5, May 25, 1960, 26‐29.

11 Noland studied at Black Mountain College, near his hometown Asheville, North Carolina, when both Albers and Bolotowsky were faculty members there in the late 1940s. Paul Reed’s interest in colors placed in close proximity to each other owes much to Albers whose influential book Interaction of Color appeared in 1963. Reed also cites the writings of the nineteenth‐century theorist Michel Eugène Chevreul, notably his 1855 text The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors, and Their Application to the Arts as important to him.

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in the city. Established in 1961, the gallery officially opened to the public in November 1962

with a posthumous retrospective of Franz Kline’s work. Many New York School painters, including , Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko attended the opening.12

The first director of the WGMA was Adelyn Breeskin. Among the shows organized

during her tenure were exhibitions devoted to Arshile Gorky (1963), Ellsworth Kelly (1963),

and Vincent van Gogh (1964). In June 1964, Gerald Nordland succeeded Breeskin. In 1965,

Nordland curated an exhibition titled The Washington Color Painters. It featured paintings by

six local artists considered the seminal figures in the new painting emerging from the city. The

artists selected were Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, (1928-

1985), (1931-1978), and Paul Reed.13

The stage had been set for this exhibition the previous year when art critic Clement

Greenberg organized an exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art titled Post

Painterly Abstraction (April 23-June 7, 1964). The Los Angeles show, a larger, more inclusive

exhibition, featured the works of thirty-one painters including most of the Washington artists

mentioned above.14

Four years before the Los Angeles exhibition, Greenberg had recognized the artists in

Washington as the heirs to the first generation Abstract Expressionists in New York. He stated

in reference to Louis and Noland:

…who both live in Washington D.C., which fact is not unrelated to the quality of their work. From Washington you can keep in steady contact with the New

12 For a history of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, see H.S. George, et al., Breaking the Mold: Selections from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1961‐1968, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 2007.

13 G. Nordland, op. cit. (note 4), 1‐50.

14 See Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964. Paintings by Paul Reed were not included in the exhibition.

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York art scene without being subjected as constantly to its pressures to conform…15

Paul Reed’s first one-man exhibition took place in 1963 at the Adams-Morgan Gallery in

Washington, D.C. It included “Mandala” paintings #3 (1962) and #23 (1962) among others.

Howard Mehring, in the introduction to the catalogue described how patterns: “…move and play freely or converge on a center gently touching and overlapping. We catch their joy and their sense of play, their friendliness.”16 Reviewers referred to the “singing beauty” of the

paintings, recalling the paper cutouts of Matisse,17 and to their Art Nouveau rhythms.18

Reed repeated the Adams-Morgan success with a one-man show in East Hampton, New

York at the East Hampton Gallery (November 12-30, 1963); a one-man show at the Jefferson

Place Gallery in Washington in January 1964; and a second one-man show at the East Hampton

Gallery from November 30-December 19, 1964.

Barbara Rose perceptively addressed one of the criticisms of Reed’s work at this time— its decorativeness. She writes:

The danger in this kind of work is that it may tend to look like applied art, if the composition can be read merely as design. By this I do not mean it is “decorative” in any pejorative sense. A painting can be decorative and still be good art as well…But in spite of these drawbacks, I see considerable potential in Reed’s work, which has none the less a fresh and engaging quality.19

Debates about the decorative pleasures of painting have long been part of the discussion

on Matisse’s art. Reed is close to Matisse in his belief that “all good painting comes from

15 C. Greenberg, op. cit. (note 8), 27.

16 Cited in L.J. Ahlander, “Paintings by Paul Reed at Adams‐Morgan,” The Washington Post, February 10, 1963, G5.

17 L.J. Ahlander, “Washington Notes,” Art International, VII, 3, March 25, 1963, 69.

18 F. Getlein, “Art and Artists: Adams‐Morgan,” The Sunday Star, Washington, D.C., February 3, 1963, E‐11.

19 B. Rose, “New York Letter,” Art International, VII, 10, January 16, 1964, 53.

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previous painting,” and strives for “beautiful color that produces pleasure.” 20 As such, Reed’s

outlook is related less to the formal strictures of Greenberg and more a reflection of Matisse’s

desire for an art of balance, purity, and serenity.21

An aspect of Reed’s formal language at this time was his use of biomorphic forms reminiscent of Miró and Arp. He refined the treatment of the mandala into eight biomorphic petal shapes floating around an open center. A dark wedge also cut the square canvas across one corner. He sacrificed fluidity of movement in favor of a more precise arrangement of hard- edge shapes emphasizing strong color contrasts, as in #17, 1964 (Oklahoma City Museum of

Art).

The exhibition The Washington Color Painters opened on June 25, 1965. Eight works by

Reed, including the above-mentioned #17, were in the show. All were acrylic on canvas.

Writing about Reed, Gerald Nordland stated:

Paul Reed has followed the most heartfelt dogmas of the color painters and has carried some further than any other. He is the only painter who continues to explore the possibilities of transparency, which were set out originally by Morris Louis. He has carried the centralized image, possibly derived from Noland, through an elaborate and felt metamorphosis involving target-like amorphous structures which became a series of eight forms, suspended on a field of saturated color. The forms were forced backward by means of complementary colored dots superimposed upon them, and have now changed again into an opaque disc with the same potential for interaction which the eight jig-saw forms had before. The artist’s most recent works involve transparent color in its most interesting new applications.22

Nordland’s reference to an “opaque disc” calls attention to Reed’s new “Disc” series begun in 1964. These water-based acrylic paintings on unprimed canvas ranging in size from

24” x 18” to 7’ x 9’ became the focus of a one-man show at the in

20 E. Stevens, “The Washington Color Painters,” Arts Magazine, November, 1965, 31.

21 See H. Matisse, “Notes of a Painter, 1908,” in H.B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968, 130‐137.

22 G. Nordland, op.cit. (note 4), 10

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1966. Works in this series include #1D, 1965 (Smithsonian American Art Museum) and #4A,

1965 (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden).

By this point in Reed’s development one already discerns an artist of extreme refinement and intelligence. He is sensitive to color, shape, visual dynamics, asymmetrical balance, and surface. Moving quickly from a flirtation with the muscular, gesture-driven works of the New

York School, to the more surface-oriented works of Rothko, Newman, and Still, to the stained paintings of Frankenthaler, Reed nonetheless creates a visual language stamped with his own personal and expressive qualities.

Along with his colleagues in Washington, he is deeply engaged in his materials, in the free-flowing nature of acrylics and the absorbency of raw canvas. One senses the discipline of his graphic design experience contributing to the meticulousness of his paintings. He works

with patience and diligence through his ideas, often beginning with numerous sketches and small-scale experiments (at least forty in preparation for the “Disc” series).

Reed’s “Upstart” series began in 1966. He featured a number of these paintings in a one- man exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York late in 1967.23 Works like

Interchange (1966), Intersection (1966), and Coherence (1966), marked a departure to bands of

hard-edge color moving in a zigzag fashion or creating a grid across the white field. Reed’s

own account of these paintings mentions the influence that Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles

(Number 11), 1952 (National Gallery of Australia) had on him.24 He was looking to create his

own version of cadenced bands across a horizontal surface. Some of the paintings in the series

23 See D.W. Scott, “Recent Paintings by Paul Reed,” New York, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, October 17, 1967. Exhibition dates: November 21‐December 9, 1967.

24 P. Reed, “Statement by Paul Reed” (audiotape transcription), November 2003, 1.

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took on a vertical format, however, appearing to rise up from the base. The wall sculptures of

Donald Judd from the 1960s come to mind when looking at these paintings. The stacked,

modular design; systematic, incremental feeling; horizontal and vertical balance; color

relationships; and strict construction principles all appear relevant.25

It seemed logical after the “Upstart” series for Reed to begin to experiment with altering

the shape of the canvas itself. Reed refers to this body of work as his “geometric abstractions.”

They are among his finest works and include such well-known paintings as Emerging XI (1967),

Topeka VI (1967), Hackensack D, 1967 (Oklahoma City Museum of Art), Zig-Field A (1967),

and Barcelona III (1969).

The late sixties saw Reed explore the aesthetic possibilities of welded steel sculpture.

Reed created the designs with the actual cutting and welding executed by his friend Bill Truitt, a

professional welder. Here the crisp design, complex geometry, modularity, and repetitive rhythms hold forth in three-dimensions as in Step (1966) and 8A (1967). Sharp, straight edges play their part but more interesting is Reed’s engagement with the dynamics of convexity and concavity. What is noticeably absent is color, a Reed trademark.26 Given the structural quality

of Reed’s painted “geometric abstractions” the lack of dialogue between the two media strikes

one as a missed opportunity. More so when we recall that a major preoccupation throughout the

career of David Smith was painted steel sculpture (especially from 1960-65).27

The “Gilport” series occupied Reed in the early 1970s. Here he returns to the center but

25 Donald Judd had reviewed Reed’s second exhibition at the East Hampton Gallery for the New York Herald Tribune. See D. Judd, “Paul Reed (East Hampton),” New York Herald Tribune, December 15, 1964, 65.

26 Reed did briefly experiment with painted steel sculpture in small‐scale works like Arc I (1967) and Cant II (1967).

27 See W.S. Rubin, Painted Steel: The Late Work of David Smith, New York, Gagosian Gallery, 1998.

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in a new way. One can read the distinctive shape as an octagon split open in the middle. It can

also read as two trapezoids floating in dynamic tension near each other. (The painted versions of the “Gilport” series consist of two separate, unstretched canvases pinned to the wall at specific coordinates.) As in paintings by Louis and Noland, the white space is as important as the colored areas.

Embedded in the “Gilport” series is a subtle and complex series of mathematical ratios and proportional schemes worthy of Piero della Francesca or Georges Seurat. The eye and the

intellect of the viewer must harmonize in order to derive the full pleasure of the experience. This precise blending of intellectual and sensual experiences is a hallmark of all of Reed’s paintings and one of his greatest strengths as an artist.

From 1962 through 1971, in addition to his activities as an artist, Reed served as Director of Graphics for the Peace Corps. In 1971 he was appointed assistant professor at the Corcoran

School of Art, a position he held until 1981.28 The Corcoran period saw Reed investigate the

expressive potential of oil pastels on paper utilizing a more automatic and spontaneous technique. He often combined drawings executed on different days to create diptych and triptych

ensembles as in Untitled 12-23-79-1 PV, 12-24-79-1 PV, 1979 (Collection of the Artist).

The initials “PV” in the above title refer to Paradise Valley, Arizona. Throughout the

decade of the 1970s Reed was a frequent visitor to Arizona.29 He was artist-in-residence at the

28 Many artists associated with the Washington Color School taught at colleges and universities in the D.C. area. Thomas Downing was at the Corcoran from 1965 to 1968. Gene Davis began to teach there in 1966. Morris Louis accepted a teaching position at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in 1952 where he met Kenneth Noland who was teaching in the evenings. Noland also taught at The Catholic University of America from 1951‐ 1960 where both Downing and Howard Mehring were his students. and taught at the University of Maryland in nearby College Park.

29 See J.K. Ballinger and A.D. Rubenstein, Visitors to Arizona 1846 to 1980, Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, 1980. Helen Frankenthaler was a also a frequent visitor to Sedona, Arizona in the late 1970s.

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Phoenix Art Museum in the winter of 1976. He was also a visiting artist at Arizona State

University, Tempe in the fall of 1980. His paintings had been exhibited in a one-man show at

the University Art Collections at Arizona State as early as 1971 and his work was regularly seen

at the Yares Gallery in Scottsdale between 1978 and 1981.

The printmaking department at Arizona State during this period was one of the most

innovative in America centered on the Arizona State University Print Research Facility

(established in 1978) and boasting such artist/educators as Jules Heller30, Leonard Lehrer, and

master printer Joseph Segura. Reed’s time at Arizona State and collaboration with Segura,

ultimately led to a body of work known as the “Gouache” paintings. These complex works are

created through a combination of painting and offset printing using opaque watercolors and

inks. The resultant forms spread across the surface in a dialogue between scraped and free-

flowing color.

The following years witnessed an expanded range of artistic preoccupations, a natural

curiosity that leads beyond the strict parameters of color school painting. Notable is Reed’s exploration of the interrelationships between and among painting, printmaking, photography, and computer imagery. In series from the 1980s such as the “Quad” photos and the “Mosaic” photos, Reed reintroduces nature and the world into his art but not without a continued reordering and reflection upon a host of strictly formal principles including geometry, color, scale, and the mechanics of art and vision.

In the photo series, Reed plays with juxtaposition, superimposition, inversion, and mirror-imagery creating collage-like effects. The “Quad” photos, LACT/Globe AZ ’82 (1982)

30 See J. Heller, Printmaking Today: A Studio Handbook, 2nd ed., New York, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1972 and Papermaking, New York, Watson‐Guptill, 1978.

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for example, contrast man-made structures with natural forms – a car with a flower, a building

and a mountain—to encourage formal and thematic dialogues between the two images. The

“Mosaic” photos, National Gallery/Smith ’85 (1985), create wide-angle views of interiors and

landscapes that force the eye to see the parts and the whole in both a sequential and panoramic

way.

Like many artists, Paul Reed often returns to methods, motifs, and themes from his past,

reinventing and recontextualizing them to create new works. In addition, like many artists,

inspiration comes from many places including the art of the past. By the year 2000, a new motif

appears in Reed’s work. It is a grouping of flat, rectangular bars, in various numbers, that

appears to hover above the picture plane moving in a diagonal direction. Reed describes the

form as resembling a “hand, flag, sail, or raft.”31 It is reminiscent of the rectangles in many of

Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings in which geometric shapes float in precise tension

across the surface. Unlike the severity of Malevich’s paintings, however, Reed’s forms hover

above a variety of fields from the painterly to the photographic. The motif is an elaboration and

enlargement of a scratched hatching element found in some of Reed’s paintings from the late

1990s such as Algenib III, 1996 (Collection of the Artist). In all cases the motif serves to

heighten the effects of spatial illusionism.

Reed paints the rectangles in a variety of ways: thinly, thickly, unified as a platform

shape (Dene, 2000), separately as individual elements (Cry-L, 2000), working in unison, or

engaged in conflict (Amara, 2001). He has also built sculptures comprised of wooden slats that mimic the form and hang freely like a mobile. When suspended against various backgrounds

31 P. Reed, op. cit. (note 22), 3. Reed also mentions the striped sleeve of the woman depicted in Renoir’s painting, La Loge (1874) as a source of inspiration for the shape.

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(including nearby paintings) the shadow of the form superimposes itself to create new works

that change with the air currents and ambient light. Finally, he has gone back to literally

superimpose the shape onto earlier paintings, photographs, and computer prints, thereby reinventing and bringing fresh life to old works as in Bofodora ’84 (1984).

Paul Reed continues to add to a prolific body of work already distinguished for its quality, originality, and art historical significance. Those of us who live and work in the

Washington D.C. area as artists, curators, art historians, art educators, critics, and art lovers owe

a debt of gratitude to Reed for the enrichment his art has brought to us and to our city. His

paintings represent an important chapter in the cultural history of Washington, D.C. and deserve

celebration, documentation, and preservation.

In this light, Paul Reed’s story cannot conclude without mentioning the plight of modern

and contemporary art in Washington. The city’s history of neglect of local artists and the failure

of many of its cultural institutions to support its native talent remains an often discussed but on-

going problem. The art collection that once resided at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art,

including important examples of paintings by the Washington Color School and Paul Reed,

today forms the core of the post-war and contemporary art collection at the Oklahoma City

Museum of Art.32

In February 1997, an exhibition (twenty-four works) of Paul Reed’s paintings, sculptures,

photographs, and prints created between 1961 and 1996 opened at the Watkins Gallery at

American University. At the conclusion to his catalogue essay the director of the Watkins

Gallery, Ron Haynie, wrote:

32 H.S. George, op. cit. (note 12). See especially the chapter “Conversations with Walter Hopps. Selections from a Series of Interviews,” conducted by Judith Richardson Markley, March 1988.

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This overview of Paul Reed’s career has been all too brief: the size of our gallery limiting the number of works we could include. There are many areas which a larger gallery or museum might investigate with a more in-depth retrospective…33

That “more in-depth retrospective” has yet to take place.34

Writing about the American University exhibition in The Washington Post, Benjamin

Forgey addressed what he called Washington’s “Second City Syndrome” and the demise of the

Washington Color School. The subtitle of his article was “Paul Reed Gets a Long Overdue

Show in his Hometown.”35

It is exciting to think that this current exhibition of works donated by Paul Reed to the

Georgetown University Library might serve as the catalyst for the long overdue and much deserved museum retrospective that the late Ron Haynie called for in 1997. Falling short of that goal, however, we take solace in this less grandiose but sincere tribute to an artist of remarkable gifts and generous spirit.

33 R. Haynie, Paul Reed: Paintings, Sculpture, Photographs, Prints 1961‐1996, Washington, D.C., Watkins Gallery, American University, 1997, 7.

34 At this writing, plans are underway for a larger exhibition devoted to Paul Reed’s work to be held in February 2011 at the Workhouse Arts Center (workhousearts.org) in Lorton, Virginia. Reed is assisting in the selection of the works that will provide an overview of his career.

35 B. Forgey, “Washington, in Living Color Paul Reed Gets a Long Overdue Show in His Hometown,” The Washington Post, February 23, 1997, G1‐5.

David Gariff is senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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